Sweet Spot

Usually when the weather forecast says 30% chance of rain and there is no rain either before it or after it we think, yeah no rain for us.  See, usually we are in the dry spot.  They will get rain in Los Molinos, Red Bluff, certainly Chico and we will get to watch, dry.  But this last weekend well, the rain clouds came for us.  I sang my rain thanksgiving song and they must have liked it up there.  Because it rained and rained and rained on us.  It was like the rain from Houston.  It came down in sheets, pounding on our metal roof.  I kept thinking it was so fast and so hard it could not last.  I was wrong.  In a little under three hours we got 2 1/2 inches of rain.  Our pond almost filled, in MAY.  Our little seasonal creek overflowed and covered our road.  All the little waterfalls on our land were running.  The week before this we had to irrigate then our south swale almost overflowed.  Since I had chopped and dropped a huge amount a few weeks before the swale had a lot of absorptive material but even so.  The rain came down so fast and so much that our inner courtyard drain which is open to the sky started to back up.  The whole thing was so surreal.  And then we saw a double rainbow.  The thing that was so strange was since the clouds were right above us, it looked sunny outside but just kept raining.

This is a pic of our entry path overflowing:
 
This is a pic of the rain and the sunshine together:

 
This is a pic of my grey water trench filling with water:
 
And here is the rainbows end:

 
 So for the first time since we have lived out here, we got to be right in the eye of a wonderful rain system- right in the sweet spot.  Chico was dry, and Los Molinos only had a drizzle.  It wasn't even terribly windy and that is just unheard for us with this amount of rain.  Hooray!! The weather might be strange but I am still grateful. 

Maintenance in Spring

 Spring is certainly work time around our farm.  But unlike Fall when we do lots of planting, Spring is the time for clearing and cleaning up.    We are in a constant struggle to stay ahead of the annual grasses.  They went to seed extremely early this year.  Yet although we got such little rain this winter they still managed to grow waste high in several places.  This always surprises me and it shouldn't.  And Spring is also the time for the big irrigation system check.  Stephen spent an entire Saturday checking all the emitters and lines to make sure they were in working order.  I had nicked some, slashed a few and several had just broken off.  We definitely lost one apple which I was hoping would bounce back.  And many of my Pakistani Mulberries look like they are struggling.  Our pear trees finally took a turn for the better after almost two years of really looking sad.  We might even have some fruit!  The peaches and plums all have fruit on them.  I used a copper spray this spring and it seemed to help a great deal with the peach leaf curl, although not entirely.  And our ash trees which were planted in the Fall of 09 are really looking like trees now.  As a matter of fact we have many trees which when seen from the window of the house look like trees!

For the first time on our farm we have had an explosion of two insects.  (I am not counting the grasshopper invasion of 2009 because we had nothing to do with that).  This year we have had a HUGE amount of ladybugs.  You cannot go outside without seeing hundreds of them.  They are mostly spread out and I find them congregating on plants that have lots of aphids like my peppermint and artemisia plants right now. 
The other big bug right now are snails.  Yes, the dreaded snail has come to our farm.  It was only a matter of time unless I quarantined every new plant I bought.  But what I find exciting is that previously these insects did not survive much because we did not have enough moisture or plant life to really support them.  So their population explosion while annoying in some ways is really a good sign.  And I have found that if you crush their shells first the chickens go crazy for them.  The snails are particularly fond of the deep shade the privet provides.  So I collect them and feed them to the chickens.  I would really love to get the chickens on the south swale now that I have scythed most it.

Speaking of my scythe, oh how I love it.  I mowed down the side of the driveway today in the cool windy weather and thought to myself how nice it was that I did not have to either stoop with my sickle or use the terrible weed eater.  After 45 minutes of using the weed eater my hands shake for several hours and I hate that.  Also the noise and the pollution are awful.  I have been using my scythe to chop and drop on the south swale which is almost done.  And then onto the north.  I learned how to sharpen it from a you tube video.  Anyone out there who is thinking of getting a scythe, if you have the need, you will not regret the purchase.

I am also happy to report that we have several volunteers around the farm which is exciting.  When plants do the planting for you its wonderful.  The clary sage has traveled to another bed, and no surprise the plantain has wandered, the goldenrod, and chicory.  Big deal you may be thinking these are considered weeds by most people.  Well, for me they are healing herbs and every time they plant themselves they occupy a niche and show me where they will do well. 




 
 This last photo is of some kind of aster.  It came in a pot with another plant and even though it looks mild mannered it took over and smothered the other plant, although it has not killed it.  The underside of the white petals are pink.  I don't know why it is doing so well.  It is not on an emitter but does get watered and it's in harsh sun and really terrible clay soil.  Plants never cease to surprise me!
Note: a reader emailed me and commented that this looks to her like English Daisy.  I had no idea they could be so tough.  Yay! It tastes spicy.  

Invasive plants

It should come as no surprise that I when I saw the book Invasive Plant Medicine by Timothy Lee Scott I made a little happy shriek and bought it for full price.  I felt that it was surely a sign for me to read it.  The book is a very good overview of how invasive plants help and heal the environment rather than degrade it as they are often accused of.  And he has a whole section on many invasive plants which are incredible healers of people too.

The highlights for me and my local were:

Star thistle
Tree of Heaven
Russian Olive
Mugwort
Mulberry
Wild Mustard
Bindweed
English Ivy

Next on my reading list, Stephen Harrod Buhner.  Happy weed wild-crafting.  Remember, if you collect a plant carefully id it first, don't take from polluted areas and leave some for future plant generations!

Getting Others to do Our Work

I think sometimes the main reason I love permaculture design so much is that I am inherently lazy.  I don't want to work hard if there is a better, easier way.  Some of  you may be thinking well, yeah doesn't everyone feel that way?  And the answer is No! I have a very close relative who likes to work hard.  They search out projects for themselves all the time.  I am sometimes amazed I am actually related to them.  But wow, they do get a lot done.  So anyway back to me and my laziness.  In permaculture you design your system to help both itself and you.  You do this by putting things that like to be together, together!  Easy huh?  So for example chickens may go in the garden area (unless you are tractoring them which is another win win).  This way they give to the garden in the form of their poo and the garden gives to them in the form of bugs and vegetable waste.  Win, win with a little human involvement.

Way back in Sept. was it? we got cited by CDF for too high grass around our storage building.  So for the last few weekends we have been installing an electric fence for the goats.  This grazing area will eventually encircle both the north and south swales.  Currently we have half of it done.  It starts on the left side of the storage building and curves around the goat pen and then swings to the north and runs parallel to the end of the north swale.  In effect creating a fire break to the north of our property.  The goat grazing/fire break area is 30 feet wide and right now about 300 feet long.  If you remember, the north is our worst fire sector; we get terrible, high, dry winds from this direction in the summer and there is a small town here too.  Most fires are started by silly humans. 

We used metal t-posts and aluminum wire attached to the posts with yellow plastic electric fence tabs.  Here are some photos:




We placed the posts about 20 feet apart.  The fence has four wires with the top wire being white stranded electric wire like that found in mesh electric fencing systems.  This part was more pricey but we think it makes the fence much more visible to the goats and deer. The bottom wire is about four inches off the ground.  We had to put three 4 foot grounding rods into the ground for this fence to be hot enough.  Definitely would not want to try that in the summer.  The electric panel is located in the Ag building.  We got all our supplies from Tractor Supply except the top white stranded wire we got from Premier.

 So to recap.  The "problem" which was high grass, turned out to be the solution to another "problem" which was feeding the goats.  Now the goats are happy to do our mowing and get fed, the fire break is becoming a reality and hopefully CDF won't see any more high grass around our buildings to make them worry.  :) Win, win, win.  This picture below is our sad little pond.  We have gotten so little rain this winter that it has not gotten even close to full.   But we love it anyway and some mallards and killdeers love it too. (Soon after this picture was taken we got a huge storm and the pond has since filled almost 2/3 full!  Yippeee!)

Intake and Output

So in permaculture we try and stack functions.  The west side of the house gets very hot and dry in the summer.  This is where the intake vent is located for our evaporative cooler.  I placed a small mini pond system here to take advantage of the overflow from the evaporative cooler and lower the temperature of the air coming into the unit.  This all seemed like a good idea.  In this pond system we had a small metal bucket filled with water, plants and some mosquito fish surrounded by plants that like water, horsetail, reed, spearmint, bamboo, and cana lilies.  There is also a shade fence that protects this area from the setting sun in summer.  A friend had some old weedy hay she did not want and I used this to form a wind break to the right of the pond system.  And this is where the problem accelerated.

As time progressed this hay started to mold.  Out in the open this would not be a problem and as I have mentioned we have fungi growing all over the farm in old piles of leaves and wood chips.  But creating a large population of mold here at the intake for our cooler created an overload.   As I mentioned in the last post this is where the mold gained entry into the cooling system in numbers great enough to pose a health concern once the mice had also deposited their debris. 

So hindsight is 20/20 and there are several things that we can do to avoid these problems. 

1. Get an outside cat (or three).  Cats keep rodent populations in check around human dwellings.  They keep mice from getting into cars and destroying wiring and peeing in your car.  They keep mice from getting into your evaporative cooler and building nests that get sucked into your house.  Our cats also keep ground squirrels from setting up compounds in our swales.  Yes, our cat, Mouser, can take down a male ground squirrel almost as large as him and eat the whole thing. 

2. Don't contaminate the intake air quality with any moist or molding plants or debris.  Mold and fungi are everywhere in our world.  This is a good thing.  But an evaporative cooler needs dry, hot, "clean" outside air to work efficiently and hygienically. So you don't want to make outside air any more full of fungi than it already is. 

3. Don't give up.  We are moving the small pond system over about ten feet to the left.  This will create all the benefits of the original system with none of the drawbacks.  The dominant wind direction in the summer is from the North and so any fungi that are present will be blown away from the cooler.   The overflow water from the evaporative cooler will be piped over to this new system and an added bonus is that this new pond system will shade the front door which gets so hot in the summer you can't touch the handle. 

So adaptation is the key here.  You observe, design, build, live and then make modifications.  Some things  are no longer serving their original purpose. Adapting to your place, climate and changing needs is the name of the game.  As a quick aside we are now the owners of a 2008 Prius.  Our lives had changed enough of late that the gas consumption of our beloved Mazda5 (20-23mpg) became too much of a financial burden. We did the math and it actually saves us money in the long term to switch to a used Prius.   And no, we are not one of those Prius drivers who fly by going 75 on I-5.  We are the annoying people in the slow lane going 62 mph.  :) But while you may shake your head in annoyance at our leisurely pace, we are getting 50 mpg for reals. 

The Power of the Fungi

Here on our farm we try in various ways to encourage our fungi friends.  One of my earliest triumphs was witnessing the fungi flowers (mushrooms) emerge outside the backdoor water patch. The tiny little mushrooms emerging from the rice straw sheltered by the cowpeas were so cute and gave me hope that I was making a difference.  Fungi are incredible creatures (plant/animal hybrids ).  I really do consider them magical and mysterious.  But they like everything in nature have a darker side.

This summer our family suffered various seemingly unrelated issues, eczema, asthma, headaches, itchy skin rashes and trouble sleeping.  My husband in particular was struggling. We went through various ways of testing our diet and detergent allergies.   Finally we had our air and dust tested for a wide variety of allergens.  The results showed only a very significant mold count.  A count high enough to harm us and contribute to some of these illnesses.  We had two specialists come and check out our house while taking air samples.  None of the straw bale walls showed any sign of mold or even moisture on their moisture meters.  The only vector for the mold we decided was the evaporative cooler.

Evaporative coolers use water to cool the air.  They powerfully pull outside air in, pass it through a fibrous filter saturated and cooled by water and then push this air into the house.  The first summer our system worked great.  And then the second summer it was good but by the third we were getting air that was too moist and did not feel very cool.  And then these strange symptoms started showing up.  We found out recently that you don't want the internal humidity to go above 60% in order to keep mold formation in check.  We recently purchased a thermometer that monitors indoor humidity.  Also in hindsight I was running the cooler for too many hours.  

Mold needs food in order to live, I know duh, but mold can live on minute stuff you might not consider food, like animal hair and dander, tiny particles of plant material and poop of any kind.  So for example it can't live on concrete unless the seal is compromised and a good source of nourishment which non-toxic sealers might be.   But we had no evidence of mold on our concrete floors.  Our evaporative system however did show signs of having mold.  And after inspection some signs of being compromised by mice.

Most evaporative coolers are installed at a window opening.  Ours since it is a higher efficiency, more powerful unit, is ducted to each side of the house.  The material of most ducting is flexible, textured metal or plastic.  From what we have figured out, the mice brought debris into our ducting and then the cooler brought outside mold to the ducting debris.  Then the mold settled into the tiny folds of the ducting and viola! moldy air.  Once the air in the house gets compromised to a certain level you start seeing health problems.  We rented a machine called an air scrubber to clean the air in our house and trap the mold spores etc.in the machine.  It was huge and cost a $100 to rent.  We did all the rooms over several hours.  Then we had the air quality tested again.  And no significant mold count.  These tests also looked for dust mites and other allergens so we knew they weren't contributing. 

Needless to say this journey and quest has given us a new appreciation for fresh clean air and the power of fungus.  Our new protocol is:
Not running the cooler for longer than twelve hours consecutively.
Airing the house out more often.
Keeping the indoor humidity lower by opening more windows in the summer.
Keeping the evaporative cooler unit super clean which means having it serviced every Fall.
Keeping fungi and mold from building up in areas where the unit pulls outside air.

This last issue is directly linked to my permaculture site design and in the next post I will elaborate.

Winter 2012

Boy this is a weird winter.  It got so cold last month we had a lot of damage on our oranges, lemons, and grapefruits.  The cold froze all the buds on the Grevellias just as they were about to flower in all their humming bird-love glory.  It killed the above ground parts of the pineapple sage and my salvias from SF Botanical Garden.  It sure didn't seem like we live in Western Garden Zone 9.  The inner courtyard of the house proved itself to be a good ten degrees warmer than the outside outside.  The picture above shows the Yolla Bolly Wilderness that is to the west of our farm.  We don't often see it covered in a snow like this.  It was awful pretty. 




But even after the resounding cold, my Acacia baileyana bloomed a few weeks later in a spectacular display of yellow puffs, and hummed with the sound of hundreds of happy honey bees. In the first picture you can see the tree in reference to the south swale bottom.  I have waited a long time to see this sight again and I was not disappointed.  The trees gave the bees much needed nectar and pollen after the cold.  The soldier-like calendula also suffered casualties but continues to bloom profusely despite the cold and offer much to all manner of insects.   

And let me take this time to high-light another hard worker that gets far too little credit here on my little blog.  The queen of the Mediterranean, the Rosemary.   I planted this evergreen shrub out the second winter we were here from a tiny pot.  It is on a drip but in the southern herb garden which has terrible soil and blistering sun.  But right now we have the canary yellow explosion of the acacia flowering not far from the brilliant periwinkle towers of the rosemary.  And the bees are in heaven.  For a much smaller plant, the rosemary has almost as many bees as the acacia. So three winter bloomers for our farm: Acacia, rosemary and calendula. 

I planted four more Silk Mimosas and finally pulled out the pine fern tree that was hopelessly tippy and unhappy on the west.  Today we have a biting cold wind coming from the northwest at about 30mph but the day is clear and bright.  The California Pepper trees planted from liners are finally big enough that they won't get lost in the grasses which are taking over as they always do.  But oh, the grass is slow to green up the hills this year.  Some places it's only two inches high.  Looks like Dec. grass instead of mid-Feb.  When I had to remove the ringed persimmon tree last month I got a chance to see what is going on in the soil profile on the south swale.  And I am happy to report that much activity was found there, even some worms! 
Just gotta keep encouraging Life.